Macho men exist in the imagined national history (Anderson, 2006) of Gha-naian election-related violence as thugs, who political leaders commonly hire during elections to snatch ballot boxes and intimidate voters at polling stations in various places around the country. In Ghana, the term macho man can be used to describe any man who enjoys working out and body-building, but those who are typically involved in electoral violence and intimidation are young men from deprived Zongo communities and northern ethnic groups. Men from eco-nomically deprived areas frequently body-build to find work as security or land guards.
Macho men were originally thought of as private, unofficial land guards be-fore they were associated with the political arena19. Every interviewee I discussed macho men with said that what makes the Zongo/northern areas of Ghana a favoured site to recruit macho men is the belief that men from these areas are more willing to go further and take more risks than men from outside these communities. My interviewees in Tamale, Kumasi, Accra and from Zongos all expressed the perception of physically big Zongo/northern men being hired as political thugs during elections.
Since the 2012 election, a group of bodybuilders have been trying to change their image from political thugs to concerned citizenry (Utas, 2012b) in Ghana’s public domain. In January 2012, Nana Kwabena Boakye created an associa-tion called Macho Men for Good and Justice (MMGJ). With headquarters in Kumasi and a membership base of more than 6,000 people around the country, the association’s objective is to tackle issues related to the welfare of macho men and Ghana as a whole.
The group aims to discourage macho men from allowing themselves to be used by politicians and to encourage them to be involved in positive tasks for the nation instead. For example, the association advocates for more employ-ment opportunities for young body-builders, including the suggestion that they could be partnered with official security task forces during elections to guard ballot boxes. Alternatively, they could be involved in the small-scale mining or agricultural sectors. In a forum that Graphic Communications Ltd organised, Boakye stated that the cost to the lives and welfare of young macho men rarely significantly outweighed the gains. This has particularly been the case when politicians have dropped macho men once they have won power and refused to
19. A land guard is typically a physically stocky man hired by landowners as informal bailiffs to force squatters off of landowners’ land.
pay them for completed work (Ghana News Agency, 2012)20. Gainful employ-ment could play a role in diverting macho men from working for politicians and against the democratic process during elections.
The MMGJ, which has assisted young men in finding work and helping with security during the 2012 elections, is trying to change the public image of body-builders as trouble makers in Ghana. The case of macho men from deprived ar-eas trying to involve themselves in elections in a positive way is a public example of the struggle that can ensue in new democracies where concerned citizens have conflicting loyalties to big men and the nation (Utas, 2012b).
Narratives of Kumasi elections
In Kumasi I interviewed a man called Alex in his early twenties who had grown up in a Zongo community there and recently moved from the area. Alex’s boss, Kwame, who is Ashanti and an NPP supporter, introduced me to him. Kwame also sat with us at the interview and contributed to the discussion from time to time. Alex classed himself as Ewe (originally from the Volta region), however, he strongly identified with the northerners he grew up with in the Zongo com-munity and could speak Hausa, the Zongo lingua franca.
Alex was an NDC supporter but was cynical about politicians in general, saying that “they are all the same”. He did not vote in 2012 because he had travelled away from where he was registered. He had not heard about or seen any violence. Our conversation then turned to macho men and the Zongo com-munity.
CA: “Do you know anything about these macho men? Do you know where they are coming from most of the time?”
Alex: “You know in this country there is some people they call land guards… They used to lift metals [weights] and build their bodies for such work.”
CA: “Are they official in anyway?”
Alex: “No. They are the same people that, when it gets to election time, people go and hire them and take ballot boxes where they feel they cannot win. They lift weights for work. If they lift weights and they are big you fear them, so macho men…It is only this election that they formed a group and they came out that they are going to protect the election… You see their symbols on their cars.”
Kwame: “My friend you saw, the NPP came at a particular time and asked him to be a macho man, a body guard. A member who associates with the MP came and 20. In 2012, the winner of TV3’s body-building competition Ghana’s Strongest Man, Faisal
Al-hassan, also spoke about his desire to work with young macho men. AlAl-hassan, who is from the city of Wa in Upper West region (one of the two northern regions bordering Burkina Faso) said that he wanted to educate youths, and especially macho men, to refrain from al-lowing politicians to use them in elections. He launched his “Operation Violent Free 2012 Elections” [sic] in Wa in 2012 (Alhassan, 2011).
asked him to work as a macho man. If you can help them when they win you can become their security.”
Earlier that afternoon when walking with Kwame, he had come across a tall, stocky friend of his whom he had greeted in the street. This example reflects how tall, stocky men can be randomly approached by a party member with links to an MP. However, this kind of random selection of macho men is not always how MPs recruit21.
CA: “Where can you find macho men?”
Alex: “You can find them through gym; you can find them through someone who knows them. Maybe If I know one macho man and you come and see me that, Chale22, I want you and your guys to do so sososo23 for me. Because we fear the body-builders so far as they have been put in the place that they should protect that place, you will not even go there.”
CA: “What is the social background of many macho men? Where are they often coming from?”
Alex: “I would say a lot of them are coming from the [Zongo] community… It’s from infancy we know that they are the people who do not fear anything. It’s been made to an extent that we believe it and they have proven us right, too…There are places that you will send me I would not go, the Zongo guy he would go.”
Given that Zongo communities were predominantly northern and vote NDC, I was interested to know if most macho men ‒ who are often recruited from these areas ‒ would be willing to work for the NPP.
CA: “Can an NPP person go and say ‘Come and be my macho man’?”
Alex: “They will go, even if the person is a strong NDC member. If he does not get what he wants from NDC, from people from NDC camp, he will go. One interesting thing is that, when you get to the Zongo community, the NDC are more. You’ll find NPP too but they will not fight.”
Kwame: “No they will not fight, but if they want to fight they’ll bring another from another Zongo community…They go outside and do that [fight], they do not do it within their own community.”
Kwame here highlights the tactics of politicians recruiting macho men from a particular area and sending them to a polling station in another town or part of the country to cause havoc. Alex pointed out that most macho men are Muslims
“and you know so far as they are Muslims they form themselves as one”. Thus,
21. See Appendix 1 for an example of how an “honourable” recruits a macho man.
22. Chale is Ghanaian slang that can be translated as ”mate” or “man” in English 23. Sososo Can be translated as do “different things” or do “this, this and this”
though Macho men may go to different areas to cause problems, they are loyal to their own particular communities.
CA: “Which politicians or party leaders go and get these macho men?”
Kwame: “It can be anybody, but actually they always depend on local people like us because once they have names, they have positions, so they will often consult people like us.”
Earlier that day in Kumasi I had also interviewed the NPP co-ordinator for the Subin constituency in Kumasi central, Mr Yeboah, who had spoken about the activities of macho men during elections. Mr Yeboah is an Ashanti man in his fifties. He had observed a calm election in 2012. Of the four interviewees I asked about why they felt elections were largely peaceful that year, I was usually given a reason why it had not been peaceful in previous years, rather than why it was peaceful in 2012. Peace seemed to be something that was expected.
According to Mr Yeboah, the reason for the 2012 peace was that there was no tense run-off and people did not want a similar level of tension to 2008 and 2004. The biometric voting system also made it pointless for people to try to reg-ister and vote multiple times, leading to one reason why less violent incidences occurred. During the 2004 and 2008 elections, Mr Yeboah’s area of Subin ex-perienced cases of ballot box-snatching by macho men on motorcycles.
According to Mr Yeboah, in one case, a macho man had started an argument with a voter at the polling station and slapped that person for no reason, making everybody turn their attention to the commotion. A second macho man then rode past on a motorbike24 and snatched a ballot box. That particular polling station only had one police officer guarding it who was outnumbered by macho men. The result of this kind of situation is that potential voters may become scared over the events at the polling station, leave the queue and not return to vote.
Mr Yeboah said that this kind of scenario typically happened in strongholds where one of the two large parties did not feel it could win. They would conse-quently engineer a plan to snatch a ballot box to have the polling station voided
24. Motorbikes have a strong negative association with political violence and disruption in Ghana, because a rider can rapidly go to a location, cause mayhem and easily get away.
Cars are the most common method of transport in the south, whereas motorbikes are more frequently used in the north. Young men on motorbikes causing trouble is a common image described by interviewees. Men on motorbikes were said to snatch ballot boxes at polling sta-tions, ride through towns and have occasional confrontations in the street with one another when they were working for political parties. This image of menacing men on motorbikes has taken on such serious dimensions that in the northern town of Bawku, where conflict has endured for more than 50 years (Aganah, 2008), men have been banned from riding motorbikes. A Bawku student of mine said that if a person visits Bawku now, where few people own non-commercial vehicles, they would see only women on motorbikes and men mostly on bicycles (Daily Guide, 2010).
or the ballot box tampered with. Another incident that occurred in Subin hap-pened while Mr Yeboah was counting ballot papers at the St Paul’s school in a crowd of people. Stones were thrown into the crowd and one hit Mr Yeboah on the head. The polling station was in a mixed area, however, the NPP had a slight majority.
Although it faces similar problems with macho men as in many parts of the country, as an Ashanti stronghold Kumasi’s political environment has an ethnic colouring that seems more pronounced than in Accra. The following case clearly illustrates the ethnic dimensions of politics in the Ashanti region. Joe is a stu-dent at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, the nation’s foremost university that specialises in the sciences.
Joe is studying agricultural science and is in his final year of an undergradu-ate degree. He grew up outside Kumasi and has lived in Kumasi as a student for four years. He did not have time to meet me while I was in Kumasi, but agreed to a telephone interview instead. He became a card-carrying NDC party mem-ber six months ago and now says that his “heart is for the party.”
Joe stated that earlier in his life, he had not been interested in being active in politics. His mother was an NDC supporter and his father an NPP man.
He grew up in the Ashanti homeland as an Ashanti and always preferred the NPP, like his father’s family. Joe said that he had been brought up like a “typical Ashanti”, always thinking that his ethnic group was the best and that northern-ers were bad people who were always involved in “fetishism and other ungodly, wicked things”.
Joe explained that people often split up and grouped themselves together by region at KNUST. Even when group assignments were given during class, Ashantis usually wanted to work together, and northerners also worked togeth-er. As a minority group in a southern majority university, northern students consequently started social groups, such as a Muslim and northern association to “encourage themselves”. With time, Joe started to become friends with some northerners and realised that they were not all bad.
Following a violent encounter with the NPP one day, Joe eventually decided to switch from the NPP and become an NDC supporter. During the heated 2008 elections, Joe had voted for the NPP in the first round. Before the country went to the run-off round, soldiers visited his house. The soldiers said that they had had a tip-off from somebody that Joe’s grandfather had sent macho men to stay at Joe’s house and that they were there to snatch ballot boxes during the election run-off. Even though Joe’s father was a known NPP supporter, his NDC mother’s side of the family had raised the authorities’ suspicions.
Joe’s maternal grandfather is a relative of the mother of former NDC presi-dent Jerry John Rawlings (1993–2001) and had previously held a ministerial position in the Rawlings government. The soldiers proceeded to ransack Joe’s
house, looking for macho men, and slapped Joe in the face. Joe said that he had always been taught that northerners were violent “but the slap I received showed how the NPP could be violent.”
After this incident in 2008, Joe decided to start supporting the NDC. This was not because he felt that the NDC was necessarily a better party than the NPP; in fact, Joe had felt that they were both as bad as one another and neither would make major improvements to Ghana. Yet with his grandfather’s contacts, and since people assumed that he was an NDC member anyway, Joe reasoned that he may as well join the NDC and try to personally benefit from them through his grandfather.
Joe also spoke of violent incidents he had heard about in Kumasi after elec-tions. A small crowd of NDC supporters were celebrating in a street in Kumasi the day after the elections. An NPP supporter who was driving a car told them to get off the road or he would run them over. They did not stop and the driver knocked three people over. One person died and two were sent to hospital but recovered. Joe said that the man is now in prison.
An NDC shop assistant was sacked by her NPP employer after she was found celebrating the NDC win at work. An NDC woman told Joe that her NPP susu colleagues would no longer allow her to take part in their susu because the NDC had won the elections fraudulently. Currently the NPP is taking the electoral commission and the NDC to court on charges of electoral fraud. There is a general feeling among NPP supporters that they have been cheated out of the presidency.
Despite all of these reported incidents, Joe was generally happy with how the elections went and felt that they had been very peaceful and much better than in 2008. He said that the biometric voting system was the main thing that had made things smoother and stopped the parties from ballot stuffing.
The case of Greater Accra
Greater Accra’s population totalled 4,010,054 in 2010 (GSS, 2012). At the gen-erally peaceful 2012 election, much of the politically motivated violence in Gha-na happened in Accra. The democratic credentials of the NDC and the police were called into question when police in full riot gear raided an NPP office in central Accra on 10th December 2012. A group of NPP supporters had been conducting forensic audits of the elections. The NPP was gathering evidence for a court case it was bringing against President John Dramani Mahama for electoral fraud.
On 12 December, the police issued a statement that they had searched the NPP office because they had received a tip-off that a group of macho men were storing weapons in a house. The NPP claimed that the police had taken impor-tant documents and laptops away with them, but the police said that they had not taken anything away (Myjoyonline.com, 2012). The NPP maintained that
this incident had been a government ploy to try to intimidate NPP members and take important data and files that the NPP would use to build a court case against Mahama. This story was discussed in the media for a few days before it died down. The media are now following the court case between the NDC and the NPP.
The day before the police search, a man wearing an NDC t-shirt was stabbed during an NPP post-election demonstration at Kwame Nkrumah Circle. Dem-onstrators were protesting about the election results, which had been announced on 9 December confirming that Mahama had won the presidency. The actual events leading up to the stabbing are not known (Gadugah, 2012).
John Arday was among the demonstrators. John is an NPP coordinator of
“party foot soldiers” as he calls them. In interview he said that he had not seen the stabbing and thought it may not even have been an NDC man that was stabbed. He said that there was no evidence that the man was wearing an NDC
“party foot soldiers” as he calls them. In interview he said that he had not seen the stabbing and thought it may not even have been an NDC man that was stabbed. He said that there was no evidence that the man was wearing an NDC